They are talking about the network that connects all their universities and colleges to the internet as well as to each other. They'll fill that in a year. 10 x 10Gbps links for a backbone? That should be minimum connection for a site.

100Gb/s isn't far away and DWDM kit will be capable of this in 5 - 7 years, if they are planning it, this is what they should be planning for.

I wonder if this might not be getting dumbed down for public consumption.

Fiber is fiber, and once you have a bunch of good-quality fiber laid down, your theoretical bandwidth is beyond anything we're actually going to use, the trick is waiting for the equipment that hooks up to it to advance.

AARNet was originally run by Optus and was a 45Mbps connection, that's now been taken over by Telstra and they offer 100Mb/s or 1Gb/s connections. Telstra will have to plan this 5 years out as they will have to put fibre / wavelegnths aside on their interstate backhauls to accomodate this. So, the fibre is already there, they just haven't allowed for enough bandwidth to serve the requirements. It's stuff like this that is holding back telecommunications in asia.

The moment that providing such bandwidth at a reasonable price even domestically (Within Aus) comes closer to parity to what's paid in Europe and America for bandwidth, let me know. I'll give you an example, get a 1Gb internet line with unlimited data (Truly unlimited) for AUD $2k or a 1Gb to the US for AUD $4k. My comment came from the fact that Australians (And a number of other countries around Asia) are used to ordering low bandwidth lines because of the extortionate pricing that you are made to pay ov

This isn't really accurate. There is plenty of capacity. Domestic and international. We're a large area but we have a tiny population remember. We have approximately 8 Tbps total to the outside world at the moment but some of it's not even lit, and of the portion that's lit, it's nowhere near fully utilised. And that extra 5.12 Tb cable you mention is due to come online in the next 18 months. So there really isn't a capacity issue in Australia, and per capita, we are connected adequately.

The 'international bottleneck' is a bit of a myth. The capacity we have now, on SXC, PPC1, AJC and others, isn't fully utilised. In fact, some of those cables aren't even being close to fully ~lit~. Plus, our total international capacity is due to almost double in the near future as the Pacific Fibre cable project is completed (estimated to be in 2013). ~The particular ISP you are using~ may be too stingy to spend the money on buying enough international capacity (and hence you may experience slower connect

To sorta go along with the previous poster, the ISPs don't need to throttle you internationally, latency does that for you. Look up TCP window sizes and have a play with it on your computer and watch your speed go up.

I get 70meg a second at my desk(And the Microsoft guys we had in last month, couldn't believe you can download the Windows 7 iso, in under 5 minutes until they all did it themselves)I guess it makes up for the crappy pay......